Australian crime fiction is booming. Now, for the first time, its lurid and elusive past is exposed. Hundreds of authors and thousands of stories have for nearly two hundred years created a national crime fiction, from the very first novel about the convict Quintus Servinton to the most recent exploits of Cliff Hardy or Claudia Valentine.

Sydney 1965. The Beatles are on every radio, and Detective Ray Shearer's on the take. Shearer acts as muscle for Kings Cross businessman George Shaloub. George has problems. He wants to knock down some terraces in the Cross to build a business centre, but heiress and local newspaper publisher Jenny Wilson is running a high-profile campaign against him. Then one of his prostitutes is found murdered - a copycat killing of an horrific rape and murder six years earlier.

One autumn evening in the city of Cardigan a bicycle goes flying off the end of the pier and its rider disappears, never to be seen again. The key to the mystery is held by Adam Windsong, who possesses the extraordinary ability to breathe underwater.

Explores the terrifying and lasting effects on a middle class Argentinian family of a single night during the summer of 1976, when some of them "disappeared" under the brutal regime of the military junta. Spanning two decades, this is a cocktail of love, betrayal, politics and revenge.

Now, for the first time, Australian crime fiction's lurid and elusive past is exposed. Over nearly two hundred years, hundreds of authors and thousands of stories have created a unique national crime fiction.

For Inspector Scobie Malone, a dinner party at the Sydney estate of Sir Harry and Lady Phillipa Huxwood, the fabulously wealthy heads of a publishing empire, proves to be an evening charged with tension between the Huxwoods and their squabbling children and grandchildren. The Huxwoods' own personal slice of the Sydney skyline - the Chronicle - is up for sale, and the family peace - if it ever existed - is about to be shattered by murder. During the night, Sir Harry is shot dead in his own bed, and his blood could be on the hands of anyone with a stake in the Huxwood dynasty.

The APA is on the offensive. First, a loudmouth redneck talkback radio broadcaster, Fred 'the Freckle' Freckleton, is forced to walk the plank from the 15th floor of a building. Then, a crusading journalist gets his neck wrung and a diehard monarchist MP is slowly cooked while his minder is fed to a pitbull terrier. And it's all the work of the Aotearoa People's Army.